


instead.

by chartreuser



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-10-01 03:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10180100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chartreuser/pseuds/chartreuser
Summary: Kicking at Zhenya’s ankles on the plane, Sasha says, “Your thirties is a great time to be alive.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thegraceinyoureyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegraceinyoureyes/gifts).



 

 _Is this all living gets you? The room, a gun stuck in your back?_    
-Lynn Emanuel

 

 

 

 

Kicking at Zhenya’s ankles on the plane, Sasha says, “Your thirties is a great time to be alive.” They’re on a flight back to Moscow, it’s the post-season, and they’re going to go to a bar, and pick up girls, and drink, and it’ll be good. It would have to be. It’s not where Sasha imagined himself to be at thirty, but he’ll have to pretend that it is.

Zhenya looks up at him from his book, a little lazily. “Global warming,” he counters.

Sasha waves a hand at him. “Always so serious,” he says. “Here I’d thought your hairline was the only thing that betrayed your youth.”

“What do I need youth for?” Zhenya asks. He closes his book, and rests his head back in his seat, turning a little to face Sasha, his hand dangerously close to Sasha’s own. “You have all of that energy, and where do you spend it? Nowhere. Never on anything important.”

“You don’t miss it?” Sasha asks. He reaches out to squeeze Zhenya’s hand, now under his own. He rubs his bruised knuckles, the little scars not yet faded on his fingers. “I do.”

Zhenya looks at him like he’s missing something, like there’s been a mistake; something lost in translation. “I don’t,” he says, finally. His words are heavy. “I think there’s a lot to regret, yes, but not much to miss.”

Sasha doesn’t flinch, nor does he say anything.

“Besides,” Zhenya continues. “We already have what we want, don’t we?”

Sasha feels Zhenya’s fingers shift underneath his own, their slotting together. He squeezes Zhenya’s hand tightly, until it must hurt. Zhenya keeps on looking back at him, almost like he’s afraid of what Sasha could say, like his words might hurt him if he weren’t careful enough. It might be true. Carelessness has been a part of Sasha—not as much as people assume, but it’s there, it’s there also in the parts of him that aren’t enough to form a caricature.

“Do we,” Sasha says. He looks out of the window, where the clouds have been indistinguishable, and unable to tell him whether or not they are anywhere near Moscow. “I don’t think we do.” He looks down to their hands. “I don’t think we can have everything we want. I think that’s impossible.”

Zhenya breathes in, leaning in closer until Sasha can feel his breath on his cheek. In here, Zhenya looks as serious as he’ll ever look, frowning a little, in his rumpled shirt from having just woken up, his one-day stubble rough on his skin, and Sasha—Sasha knows exactly how it’d feel, if he wanted to slide a hand across his jaw to kiss him, to kiss him like only kissing would be enough.

“The problem with me,” Sasha interrupts, before there is anything to even interrupt, “Is that I feel I want too much.”

“But you can’t have everything,” continues Zhenya.

Sasha squeezes his hand again, once. “But I can’t have everything,” he repeats. The plane is so quiet that Zhenya’s breathing is audible, even over the sound of the engines thrumming. In this space—in nowhere and everywhere, Sasha wonders how long they have left until they’ve got a different pair of shoes to fill. He feels like laughing, inexplicably. “I thought this was what I wanted, when I was younger. I thought this was everything.”

Zhenya looks sympathetic, in the way that you didn’t want your closeted boyfriend to be: like he understood that even what they have here was a luxury. Sneaking little touches like teenagers in a timezone they had no grasp on. You couldn’t do this back in Magnitogorsk. You could do all this in North America, but only if you didn’t want to go back. Sasha can’t imagine not going back, but he can’t imagine going back forever, either.

“In the way all kids do,” Sasha says, leaning into the space between them, courageous if there was a name for it, a little middle finger to the invisible audience that was there, always, there every time they fucked or kissed or held their hands together like this, “I thought that maybe when I reached thirty, the world would be a more accepting place.”

“The world is,” Zhenya says.

And it is, but it’s not what Sasha meant, and Zhenya knows it. “The world isn’t,” Sasha amends, and he doesn’t bother clarifying what world of his he’s talking about. “The world hasn’t changed, and maybe it won’t change, so I don’t know what I was so stubborn for back then. So I thought, at fifteen, it’d be like this: I get to be a professional athlete, play in the Olympics, and marry a man by the time I was thirty, because a decade and a half is a long time, you know?”

“I know.”

“And instead,” Sasha says. “Instead.”

Instead he has Zhenya’s hands curled up into his own, and they’re watching the aisle for anybody walking by, anybody that might recognise them. “Instead, we have, we’ve got,” Sasha tries, but he can’t think of anything to speak. The exhaustion catches up with him. He grits his teeth together and looks back at Zhenya, their hands tangled, hurting, and they’re hurting each other; they’ve been hurting each other for so long, but Sasha can’t imagine stopping, he can’t imagine letting go.

When they were fifteen, Sasha had already known Zhenya, swatting at him with a hockey stick whenever they happened to cross paths, Sasha grinning toothily as he still had all his teeth. Zhenya would hit him back, and it’d be a short little while of bickering, and even then Sasha knew that he couldn’t be too friendly, that it was important to keep his distance. Sometime in the future, was what he thought when he was younger, and maybe the world would be more progressive then, or maybe it would hurt a little less, maybe there’d at least be something, that one day, if he waited long enough, there’d be something.

 

 


End file.
